The Best Games on the Xbox 360

Cream of the crop.

After a shaky introduction to the world of video games with the release of the original Xbox, few thought that Microsoft would ever find long-term success in the home console business. But then the Xbox 360 came along and became one of the best-selling consoles of all time. Hundreds of games have been released for the Xbox 360 since its release in 2005, making the task of choosing the best on the console an extremely tough one. But the games we've chosen below do represent an excellent cross section of the most outstanding, exciting, important, and just plain fun game experiences you can have right now on the Xbox 360. Do you agree with our choices? Read on and tell us in the comments below.

GameSpot Score: 9/10, User Average: 9.2/10 "Regardless of whether you're getting sucked into the Story mode or competing for high scores in the Challenge mode, Batman: Arkham Asylum does an outstanding job of letting you be Batman. Everything about this game--the impressive visuals, stirring soundtrack, superb voice acting, fiendish puzzles, hard-hitting combat--feels like it has been lovingly crafted by a development team that's both knowledgeable and passionate about the source material. Miss out on this one and the joke's on you."

GameSpot Score: 8/10, User Average: 8.4/10 "Chock-full of often silly but always memorable moments, Bayonetta is hard to get out of your mind even after you've stopped playing it. More than anything else, almost everything about Bayonetta feels just right. Its host of hidden items and secrets, multiple difficulties, competitively balanced scoring system, and charismatic heroine make it a game that will be revisited time and time again. This is one action game that you absolutely must not miss."

GameSpot Score: 9/10, User Average 9.0/10 "While on the surface it might look like little more than a very pretty first-person shooter, BioShock is much, much more than that. Sure, the action is fine, but its primary focus is its story, a sci-fi mystery that manages to feel retro and futuristic at the same time, and its characters, who convey most of the story via radio transmissions and audio logs that you're constantly stumbling upon as you wander around. All of it blends together to form a rich, interesting world that sucks you in right away and won't let go until you've figured out what, exactly, is going on in the undersea city of Rapture."

GameSpot Score 8/10 "With the fixes and gameplay mechanics, what remains is Blood of the Werewolf in its finest form: enjoyable, challenging, and, at long last, satisfying to the very end. Dreadful traps and Hollywood's most famous monsters stand in your way. How long will you last against the forces of darkness?"

GameSpot Review: 9.5/10, User Average: 8.1/10 "(Braid) serves as the contemplative companion to the typical Mario adventure while embracing the unbridled fun found in the best platformers. Clever gameplay mechanics are the driving force, pushing you toward your inevitable confrontation with the woman you've lost, but it's the engrossing story that cements this as something really special."

GameSpot Review: 8/10. User Average: 7/10 "The campaign hits the same satisfying rhythms, the multiplayer captures the same frenetic intensity, and the cooperative zombies mode delivers the same stale undead-massacring action. Caught between striving for the future and remaining rooted in the past, Black Ops II finds solid footing, providing another great ride on the Call of Duty rollercoaster."

GameSpot Review: 9.5/10, User Average: 8.8/10 "Any game can deliver a few cheap scares. It takes a special one to terrify you. Dark Souls is such a game. It's a thoughtful, atmospheric, and mysterious role-playing adventure that challenges your mind and your mettle."

GameSpot Review: 9/10, User Average: 8.9/10 "Dead Space is a remarkable game from a well-tread genre that manages to stand out from its competitors in almost every way, from visual presentation to engaging story, innovative combat mechanics to fright factor. Whether you're looking for a terrifying horror experience or a deeply story-driven adventure that will keep you engaged for 15-20 hours, Dead Space is a fantastic game that you should not pass on."

GameSpot Review: 9/10, User Average: 8.4/10 "Dirt 3 improves and builds upon its superb predecessor at just about every opportunity. The new multiplayer modes and gymkhana events are great additions, and if you're interested primarily in traditional racing disciplines, it has more than twice as many routes to race in more varied weather conditions and in an even greater selection of vehicles."

GameSpot Review: 9/10, User Average: 8.4/10 "Yet even though it allows you to wipe the recent slate clean, Dishonored still begs to be replayed from the beginning. Unlocking different powers, finishing missions in different ways, striving to be more or less murderous, and seeing a different endgame all offer appealing incentives to give it another go. It's a rare game that feels so compulsively replayable, but Dishonored is such a game."

GameSpot Score: 9/10, User Average: 8.9/10 "Fallout 3 is leaner and meaner than Bethesda's previous efforts, less expansive but more intense, while still offering immense replay value and quite a few thrills along the way. Whether you're a newcomer to the universe or a Fallout devotee, untold hours of mutated secrets are lurking in the darkest corners of Washington."

GameSpot Score: 9/10, User Average: 8.7/10 "Far Cry 3 is a delightful and harsh tropical wonderland, crawling with wildlife and threatened by the pirates and drug runners that disrupt its peace. The troubled paradise you explore is colorful and wild, enticing you to investigate its ravines and discover new ways to enjoy the open-world playground sprawling in front of you. This is a game that ignites the desire to complete every last challenge and check out every last icon on your map."

GameSpot Review: 9.6/10, User Average: 9.2/10 "In Gears of War, a slab of concrete is your best friend. And if that slab of concrete isn't around, you can always make do with burned-out cars, piles of metal, huge columns, or even the ever-popular wall next to a doorway. Why are these inanimate objects so friendly? Because if you aren't hiding behind something in Gears of War, you might as well be dead. If its exciting campaign doesn't rope you in, chances are the team-based multiplayer will--either way, Gears of War is downright amazing."

GameSpot Review 9/10, User Average: 9.0/10 "GTA V is a complicated and fascinating game, one that fumbles here and there and has an unnecessary strain of misogynistic nastiness running through it. But it also does amazing things no other open-world game has attempted before, using multiple perspectives to put you in the thick of cinematic heist sequences and other exhilarating, multi-layered missions like no open-world game before."

GameSpot Score: 9.5/10, User Average 8.9/10 "Plenty of games (have) attempted to duplicate the Halo formula, with varying degrees of success. But there's still nothing quite like the genuine item. Halo 3 is a positively amazing package that offers extreme satisfaction across all of its different parts."

GameSpot Score: 9/10, User Average 8.6/10 "L.A. Noire is a unique game with a terrific sense of period atmosphere, absorbing investigation mechanics, and a haunting tale with plenty of moments that would be right at home in a classic film noir. Those smoky nights spent listening to jazz at the Blue Room, and the price you paid for them, will stay with you long after you've retired your badge and gun."

GameSpot Score: 9/10, User Average: 9.0/10 "Mass Effect's galaxy you want to explore that is populated with characters you are glad to know. Mass Effect 2 is the kind of game that you return to, not just because it's fun to play multiple times, but also because its universe is a place you wish you could call home."

GameSpot Score: 9/10, User Average: 8.5/10 "With its gripping narrative, brutal violence, and fantastic implementation of Max Payne's bullet-time ability, this is a distinctive and outstanding game through and through, and it's easily a worthy successor to the Max Payne games that preceded it."

GameSpot Score: 9/10, User Average 9.1/10 "As you journey through the massive Aperture facility, it becomes clear that Portal 2 does not merely come after Portal. Instead, it radiates outward from its predecessor, simultaneously illuminating the world that gave rise to Portal and continuing the adventure that began there. The sense of novelty is diminished, but the thrill of exploration and puzzle-solving is still intoxicating, and it's amazing how Portal 2 manages to tell a better story with disembodied voices and spherical robots than most games can with full-on humans."

GameSpot Score: 9.5/10, User Average: 9.2/10 "This is an outstanding game that tells a great story with memorable and occasionally laugh-out-loud-funny characters. Think about great moments that you remember from spaghetti Western movies, put them all into one 20- to 40-hour epic feature, and picture yourself in the starring role. Now you have some idea of what's waiting for you in Red Dead Redemption."

User Average: 8.3/10 "Rock Band 3 not only introduces new and exciting things to the world of rhythm games, but it does almost everything better than those that have come before it. When it comes to accessible, inventive, and immensely entertaining music video games, nobody does it better than Rock Band 3."

GameSpot Score: 9/10, User Average: 9.0/10 "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim doesn't rely on sheer scope to earn its stripes. It isn't just that there's a lot to do: it's that most of it is so good. Whether you're slashing a dragon's wings, raising the dead back to life, or experimenting at the alchemy table, Skyrim performs the most spectacular of enchantments: the one that causes huge chunks of time to vanish before you know it."

GameSpot Score: 9/10, User Average: 7.7/10 "Spelunky doesn't extend a helping hand when you're down. It doesn't have mercy. And that stubbornness is one of the main reasons it's so hard to pull away from the game. When you finally conquer something that has been hounding you for hours, you feel like the best darn explorer on the planet, and that feeling overshadows all the hardships you overcame down the troubled path you traveled."

GameSpot Score: 9.5/10, User Average: 7.7/10 "It's impossible to point to just one element that makes Super Meat Boy such an extraordinary game. From the intense-though-always-fair difficulty and the inspired level design, to the pinpoint controls and catchy soundtrack, all of the different aspects converge into something that is truly outstanding."

GameSpot Score: 9/10, User Average: 8.6/10 "Pure entertainment: that's Vanquish in a nutshell. This speedy and thrilling third-person cover-based shooter is all madness, overwhelming you with gigantic robots, flurries of gunfire, and explosions so powerful and colorful that you might think you feel the heat. There are a lot of things to love about Vanquish, but its most impressive feat is that while it uses mechanics you've seen in other shooters, it feels nothing like them."

yeah missing Witcher 2, AC: Black Flag and Dragon's Dogma, great game with awesome boss fights and a cool mixture of a JRPG with some western rpg. It's a good list and I've played almost all of it. I do agree with Vanquish, that game was fun as hell, short but love the gliding and the franctic shooting. I hope they make a second game.

This list exemplifies why I ended up never getting an xbox 360, while it was better than the PS3 for 99% of the multi-platform titles, it was nowhere near what a decent gaming PC bought within the last 5 years or so (or even around the same time it was released) could muster... I already had a gaming PC.

I got my PS3 mainly for Wipeout HD and the media player capabilities at first (DLNA, blue ray...) then I got into the Sony exclusives.

However for a console only gamer, the 360 is a great machine, it does not need many exclusives.

@ksbwings That makes no sense. Where does it say its "supposed to be exclusives"? Games library. That's why I buy consoles. L4D 1&2, Metro 2033, The Witcher 2, were amongst the exclusives that I have on 360, that I cant play on my PS3. My PS3 has TLOU, Uncharted series, GoW etc. Those are exclusive, but I also have MGS Legacy collection which is not. Games Library.

there should be more 360 exclusives on this list, as most of these games are multiplatform, i'm also suprised that Alan Wake isn't on here...i still have my 360 but it just sits in storage as I don't see any reason to hook it up, there just aren't any exclusives that I find worth playing...also GoW is very overrated imo

These lists always take the route of only including one game per series which I understand to a degree but it doesn't make them very accurate. For example, Gears of War was a very influential game but Gears of War 2 had the most variety within the campaign and introduced Horde Mode, while Gears 3 has more content and more polish than any game has a right to. While the first may be the most influential I would say 2 and 3 are better at pretty much everything. And I would say Halo 3, Halo Reach, and Halo 4 are all better games than, say, Max Payne 3 or LA Noire. And while Portal 2 may have more to it than the first game, not including the original Portal just seems criminal to me. And lastly, there are almost no XBLA games on this list. Braid? Limbo? Shadow Complex? Bastion? Dust? Not even Castle Crashers?

@Setho10 Gears of War is the best in the franchise (though I haven't played Judgment). At least that's my take. By going "bigger and badder," Gear 2 lost the intimacy and fear that made Gears so interesting. Halo Reach and 4 were also entirely forgettable. Yes, we wanted just one game per franchise, but I wouldn't have included those anyway. But I understand your point.

We did include Braid. We talked about Limbo, Shadow Comlex, and Castle Crashers. It's a hard list to make. There are plenty of great games that didn't make the cut.

@TomMcShea Whoops! Missed Braid. Sorry. Personally my issue with the first Gears is its lack of variety. It felt very much like the first entry in a new franchise that it was in that it laid down some great groundwork with solid fundamentals but there wasn't enough to it. There was the car sequence, and the Krill portion but outside of that it was just the same arena battles from beginning to end. What I liked about 2 was the variety. Some missions worked better than others but I thought that the abandoned base mission was just as atmospheric and scary as the Krill mission in the first game, and just having more varied environments and missions helped keep the game fresh the whole way through. 3 I'll agree with you, though. The scale there did cause the game to lose something and it lacked any mission like the Krill or abandoned base mission.

I think it's fair to not include Reach or Halo 4. But you get what I'm saying. Although I know LA Noire has some big proponents at Gamespot I still feel like it is tough to make an argument that it is more worthy of inclusion than GTA4 or Oblivion or Bioshock Infinite (although I know you would make a major argument against that last one).

@TomMcShea Also thought I should add that I enjoy debating this but obviously these types of lists are subjective and incredibly difficult to make so I appreciate the effort. And most of your choices are solid. I hope you guys do a PS3 list. That should prove a bit more interesting considering the very divisive nature of some of Sony's big exclusives and the fact that there are a lot more worthwhile exclusives worth mentioning that could knock some of these games off that list.

Tales of Vesperia should be here, the western localization is exlusive to 360 and is a great game in it's own right. And Gears of War 3 it's the most complete and best iteration of the franchise, it's such a rare case of quality and quantity.

@santinegrete i agree with you on tales of vesperia. it came out back in the 360's golden age of jrpgs. these days you'd be lucky to get anything even remotely resembling a japanese rpg for 360. i dont blame ms for giving up on the japanese market, it never sold well over there but the numerous jrpgs that came out for the system early in the system's life are the main reason i chose the 360 over the ps3

@FLEEBS honestly, i think both of them are steaming piles of shit but reach was at least tolerable and only when played in campaign online with a friend. also, halo's got the most baffling, "dumber than a box of rocks" teeny boppers on xbox live. only time i ever played it is when some friends would beg me to play with them in a private match, just friends